A Comprehensive Pattern-based Overview of Stegomalware

  • In recent years, malware increasingly applies steganography methods to remain undetected as long as possible. Such malware is called stegomalware. Stegomalware not only covers its tracks on the infected system, but also hides its communication with adversary infrastructure. This paper reviews 106 stegomalware cases on the basis of 133 reports, including digital media (audio, video, images), text, and network steganography. For this purpose, the steganography methods used by the malware are categorized and introduced using a pattern-based approach. Our survey reveals that solely a small set of patterns are employed by known malware samples. We also analyzed the commonalities of media-, text-, and network-based stegomalware. We show that only a small variation of network protocols, media types and hiding methods are utilized by stegomalware. For this reason, research may focus on these to counter malicious activities covered by steganography.

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Metadaten
Author:Fabian StrachanskiORCiD, Denis PetrovORCiD, Tobias SchmidbauerORCiD, Steffen WendzelORCiD
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3664476.3670886
Parent Title (English):Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
Publisher:ACM
Place of publication:New York, NY, USA
Document Type:conference proceeding (article)
Language:English
Date of first Publication:2024/07/30
Reviewed:Begutachtet/Reviewed
Release Date:2024/11/20
Tag:information hiding, steganography, steganalysis, detection tech niques, malware, threat intelligence
Pagenumber:10
First Page:1
Last Page:10
institutes:Fakultät Informatik
Research Themes:Digitalisierung & Künstliche Intelligenz
Licence (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International
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